Texturing Surface Noise, Dirt, & Wear

In this course you will learn to create a photo-real game prop using modern game art production techniques. You will gather reference, generate a base model, create a high polygon model, bake details onto a low poly model, and then texture and present a final portfolio piece. This course is aimed at students who have some knowledge in 3d and game art and would like to learn more advanced techniques employed in the creation of modern game assets. We will be using Maya, Zbrush, Marmoset, and Substance Painter extensively throughout the course. When you are finished you will have your own model based of of a real-world prop suitable for use in modern game engines.

In this module you will take your low-poly model and add back the missing detail from the high-poly by baking texture maps. You will also use Substance Painter to add color, material, and micro-details not present in the high poly. This is where the model will start to become photo-real. The goal here is to take a well crafted model and use texture maps to bring it to life.

講師

Andrew Dennis

Professor of Practice

字幕

In this video, we'll focus on the materials and start adding some grunge and surface noise to bring more realism into our model. So in this video, I want to add some small details; fine surface, noise, bumps to take what are very smooth materials and give them a little variation in roughness, in height. It gives me more information. It's going to make the final object look a lot more realistic. Here you can see up close, it's not a smooth plastic. It has some pretty fine definitions to everything. It's got that mottled pattern injected into it. So the first thing I want to go to, is take a look at this black plastic and add some height information there. So under black plastic, I can go into my base color, and then right above it, I want to insert another layer. I'm going to insert another fill layer. This fill layer, I'm going to call surface noise. So I want to change the color to something like red, so it's easier to see, and give it a little height information that just goes into the surface. So I need to right-click my mask, add a fill, and now under gray-scale, I'm looking for a good noise type that's going work for me. This dirt five is pretty good. It's pretty random. It's not super even and we could see I can play with the scale here. I've set it to triplanar projection, so that we don't get any blurring at the corners or edges. Adjust the contrast and the balance, and then if I turn color off and start adjusting the height, as you can see how I could push this into the surface of the object. Giving it a nice little pitting. Since the [inaudible] generative, it's really easy for me to come back to this and make small adjustments to everything. We can see with that combination of paint on top of this mottled surface, it's going to have a really nice reflectiveness there. Now, I can see that also affected the glass which I don't want it to do. So on glass, I want to make sure that its height isn't being affected by the things it's under it. So I'm going to take this black plastic, and I'd never made a mask for this before because I put it at the bottom. But now that I'm adding some of these surface details, I want to make sure that I use that ID mask again. There's a couple of spots where this ID mask we can see gives us this little white overlay. This is because we need to adjust the tolerances. So this is basically how far does it blend in. So we can see just like a tolerance on like a selection on Photoshop if we go too low, we lose all of that detail, if we go too high it goes into the glass. So I'm just going to go into the rubber selection, and up its tolerance a little bit. So I can make some small changes to the tolerance on the black plastic, and a couple adjustments to the tolerances on the gray plastic. I'm working back and forth and seeing what's going to remove those white lines, without obliterating some of the fine details that I've got already. But it looks good, it looks like I'm not losing anything. Next, I'm going to go into rubber, and I'm going to do the same thing. I had to fill layer, also surface noise, turn off everything but the color and height details, give it a black mask, add a fill. I'm looking for which noise I think is going to do the job I'm looking for the most. I'm looking for these like what different types of, like there's so many different grunge patterns and dynamics we can get in here. So maybe something like a dirt three which is a little bit more even, it's going to give me a different pattern. Because we want here like these by changing things like the bounce, the contrast, and adjusting the scale, we can get some of the randomness we're looking for of this rubberized material. Playing with the height and setting it in. It's like you don't have to go very far with this. Too far is definitely going to look really fake, so we have to be really subtle with things like the height details in here. So we can see by adjusting the balance, we can just create these occasional little pockmarks, or by setting the balance way high, then we get this idea of they're much more evenly distributed. I'm going to go to my height value under layers, just tone it down a little bit making it easier to control. I rotate my light around a lot it helps me see these materials as I'm working with them, that's why it's such an easy hot key to do that. Now, I'm going to add a new fill layer in my stickers group but I'm going to name this sticker wear. This is where I'm going to put some of the wear and tear that you would expect from a sticker as it corrodes over time. To get my whole sticker group to apply properly, I'm going to take the folder containing stickers. I'm going to add a new mask to it. I'm going to paste what I originally had for my stickers into this mass, so everything under is controlled by that. Now, I take sticker wear, I add a mask to it, and I'm going to add a fill with the clouds too. I'm going to turn off everything but color and roughness, and I want to give it a dusty color to it. The way the color of a sticker might have under it, that starts to wear down after a while. Play with the scale. Since this is and the little 1440 sticker on the same thing, it's pretty easy to adjust them together. Let's go to the base color, and I can slide down how strong the value is. So pretty low because I want it to be really subtle with how much color is in there, but I'm going to independently control it on the roughness value because I want the roughness to be a lot stronger effect than the coloring difference. We can see the parts of the sticker that are still smooth, than the parts that had been worn a little thin, or worn a little rough on the surface. Now, I'm making a separate group for the battery label by itself, and I can put all of the battery label objects into this group. I can see him taking the whole group and I need to make some adjustments so that its height values come through more cleanly. I'm also going to create wear for my paint group. So I put all the paints in one group, and just by putting a little clouds fill in there, I can control the idea that maybe some of these paints chipped off after time. I don't want it to be too strong, because I don't want this to look like it's been destroyed. But if you really want to do like worn or eaten-off paint, this is a great way of doing it. Just a high-contrast, and then adjusting the balance to see how strong it comes through. Just a couple of flex in it coming off is going to help me sell the idea what I'm going for here. Let's apply a layer of dust to this whole thing. I'm going to take a fill group, put it on top of everything and call it dust, and I'm going to give this maybe a sandy brownish but pretty dull color. I don't want to go too saturated with it. I want it to have a lot of roughness and I want it to be pretty close to gray. Throw a black mask on there. Now, I'm going to go to generator, and I'm going to add a dirt generator. This is going to just fill things up based on what was one of the reasons we bake that curvature map, it uses the curvature map to determine where the edges and crevices of things are, so it can start sticking things in areas where dirt or dust might settle. But I want it to be a pretty subtle effect. I don't want it to be too strong. Again, I want it to look like it's been just well-used, not so much like it's been sitting in a sand dune for a couple of years. So I'm adjusting the dirt level and I'm paying a lot of attention to where things like my glass are going to shine through. Because I want a little dirt on them, but I still want to make it look like this is a usable and functional thing that you could pick up and start using this. I'm going to rename this dust edges because I'm going to make a second fill layer. This time I want to make a dust that's just going to go over the whole surface. I'm going to duplicate the dust edges layer and rename it dust surface. Take out that generator because I want the same color, and I'm going to add a fill to it. This time, I'm give it a large something like I'm going to use clouds three this time. Triplanar projection and I could see I can add a level to even surface. With all this effects, I usually start really strong with everything and then I get more subtle after I know what kind of pattern it's creating. So like I said, I'm going to turn it way down to something like 33 percent. The roughness, I want to change even less than that. Just these fine little details can really help sell the realism of the material. Let's come back to the black plastic. I'm going to add a new fill here. This one I'm going to name scratches. Maybe it's sitting in a bag somewhere. It's rubbing against hard metal or things like that. I'm going to get lots of little scratches. So with a black mask I'm going to add a fill. To that fill, I'm going to fill this with one of these grungy scratches. I'm going to go for grungy scratches rough. I want to adjust the scale so it feels like it's relative to this object and once again go for a triplanar projection. I'm going to adjust the scale to make sure that it's the right size but it doesn't look like it's repeating too frequently. I don't want to make it too obvious that this is a repeating texture. Let's come down to some of these settings. I can adjust by these different parameters. These little generators that they give us here have a lot of controls, and I want to turn everything off except for just the roughness here. You can see how adjusting the roughness to something even just a slight difference in making it rougher than the other regions is going to create a really interesting effect for us. It's subtle but especially when we look at this thing from an angle, it's going to be pretty clear what's happening. I want to turn the quantity of these scratches down a little bit, and let's crank the tiling on this all the way out. I'm going to put a couple of splotches in there. I don't want too many. The dust tiling I want pretty high, but I'm going to leave the dust intensity pretty low. Sometimes the sliders aren't precise enough. It's easier if I just type in the number. Play a little bit with some height, but I think the effect it gives me is just too strong if I make a real adjustment to it. If I'm going to to keep it, it has to be real subtle. I don't want it to look like gouges. I want it to just look like normal wear and tear. I'm playing with the roughness and trying to decide do I want to make the plastic look like it's shiny plastic with a coating? If I was doing metal the scratches would need to be more diffuse. But in this case because it's plastic, I like having the scratches be shinier because the chances are that the plastic itself would be a little shinier in the places it gets scratched. Now, I want to add some edge wear to everything. I'm going to create a new fill layer with a new black mask and a new generator. I'm going to choose the metal edge way. This is going to focus on just the edges of this model on this particular material because I want to hit. I want to dull up and ding up the corners where things are going to have rubbed off against other things and lost a little of that sheen. So I'm trying to scale back the wear level and contrast, and I want to just really focus it on the corners. Often with this thing, I have in mind the effect I'm looking for. So I'll just play with sliders as I see is this getting the pattern I want. Here, you can see that I'm looking for something that with just small changes to the roughness can give the impression of this thing has been worn over time. Areas where oil or grease on my palms might wear away at this thing and make it a little duller at the edges by getting it closer to that white side of things. I find subtlety with stuff like this is really the key to realism and making it not look as cartoony. I'm going to turn off my dust surface and edges for now just because I want to see more clearly how I'm changing and affecting the surfaces below it. Let's go down to the glass and I'm going to add some scratches here too. New black mask and a new fill. This time I'm going to choose these fair scratches, these little fine scratches which to me are closer to the scratches you would see on glass. So I'm going to turn off everything here besides roughness, and make some adjustments till I see how is the roughness affecting this shine on the lenses, and that's how I'm going to tell where my scratches are. Now I come back in and play with my balance and contrast. Now, I'm going to create a new layer and this is going to be the little wear on the edges from my glass. I'm going to add a generator, and I'm going to go back to that dirt because the dirt will fill in the curvature areas of this glass. So it's going to ignore the centers and it's going to fill in the areas towards the edges. This is the places where even if I'm polishing the lenses a little bit of grime tends to build up and it's hard to clean out. I'm going to really quickly do the same effect to put some scratches on the rubber just like before. I had it fill layer, I had a black mask, and then I can put a fill into it. Now, I need to repeat things like the scratches and some of the edge wear on top of the curve part of my plastic for everything on the gray plastic, just like I do with the black plastic. The only difference here is that this was always a smoother plastic and it doesn't have the surface noise that my other materials are going to have. Now, I can come into rubber and add an edge wear here too. On the stickers, I'm going to add a scratch in addition to the surface wear. Because I figure if the plastic had gone scratched up chances are the stickers are going to have had the same effect. So black mask, black layer, and add a fill with our grunge scratches. I can see now with all these little details that I've added in just the texturing how much realism I've given this model. I'm turning the dust back on and now that I have all my other surface details, we can see how these are going to read now that I've put in all this little surface noise to things. So I'm going to take dust surface and I'm adding a paint, and now I can use a grunge brush on top of the generator clouds layer to erase away areas that I think might have been polished. Almost imagining someone took a cloth and cleaned these is what I'm doing by hand. A lot of the texturing processes we do, the ones we do by hand, I like to think about those as things I wouldn't let a computer do. The things that I would make changes by hand too. So anywhere I feel like this effect is too strong, I can just take this little grunge paintbrush and remove it. So I like how this is looking. I've added a lot of realism to the details of this object, and I think I'm ready to start exporting my textures and bring them into marmoset for the last stage of texturing. In the next video, I'm going to add one last detail that I've left off with this model up into this point. This is going to involve emissives, normal baking, and how we can bring this all together to create a key little light feature using just texturing, and a couple of new techniques that I haven't shown you yet in Substance Painter.